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Situated among fields (applied linguistics creative writing studies writing studies) this book empirically explores the language of writers in contexts of learning externalized in literary genres. At its core this book features linguistic and thematic analysis of the writing and reflections of adults who experienced what they usually described as meaningful CW in university coursework sometimes in science and research-focused courses where they might not have expected to compose a literary genre. In addition to synthesizing empirical studies that in total included more than 3500 participants chapters present new research involving about 400 more. This book is meant to be substantial in its goal of systematically organizing what is known about CW’s relationship to writers: in terms of feelings of engagement gains in content knowledge and revelations about oneself and others.

A Cognitive Perspective on Spatial Prepositions: Intertwining networks is devoted to the issue of the relation between language and thought approached from the perspective of spatial relations encoded by four equivalent spatial prepositions – English to German zu Polish do and Russian к. Regarding these prepositions as path-prepositions the authors show that the prepositional semantic structures are conceptually grounded in the PATH and the MOTION-EVENT frames and explain that prepositional senses emerge as a result of the PATH image schema transformations and metaphorical mappings related to the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor. Based on their findings the authors show how senso-motoric functioning life experience individual knowledge imagery and different ways in which people conceptualize the world influence the relation between language and conceptualization.

This book explores an important aspect of human existence: humor in self-translation a virtually unexplored area of research in Humour Studies and Translation Studies. Of the select group of international scholars contributing to this volume some examine literary texts from different perspectives (sociological philosophical or post-colonial) while others explore texts in more extraneous fields such as standup comedy or language learning. This book sheds light on how humour in self-translation induces thoughts on social issues challenges stereotypes contributes to recast individuals in novel forms of identity and facilitates reflections on our own sense of humour. This accessible and engaging volume is of interest to advanced students of Humour Studies and Translation Studies.

Within cognitive and functional approaches to language structure and grammaticality analogy and contrast represent two fundamental human cognitive capacities which up to now have mostly been examined separately. This volume seeks to bridge that gap and in doing so it brings together cutting-edge theoretical and empirical research in the field. The chapters in this book examine analogy and contrast across a variety of languages (English Finnish Hungarian Polish Russian) for different language phenomena (constructions lexical semantics morphology sentence structure text organization) and with the use of various methods (corpus linguistics discourse analysis experimental methods qualitative analysis quantitative analysis). This state-of-the-art research presented in the book should be of interest to specialists within Cognitive Linguistics corpus linguistics construction grammar discourse analysis translation studies metaphor research and cross-cultural research.

This volume proposes a novel structural analysis for causative constructions offering a solution for the long-standing mono/bi-clausal dualism. Causatives are claimed to instantiate a ‘complex object’ construction insofar as the causee is not only the subject of the lexical verb but also a participant that is related to the whole event. Furthermore the analysis reveals that the realization of causatives implies a crucial interplay with the pseudo-relative construction a much-debated structure as well. Data from Scandinavian languages are highlighted through the results of an experimental test on the scope of negation and adverbs supporting the present analysis. The book offers a cross-linguistic perspective as it discusses the relevant constructions in languages including Italian English French Portuguese and Spanish.

Understanding vocabulary and its role in language learning is one of the central tasks of applied linguistic research. It is also an area that has seen and continues to see huge progress in terms of the complexity and diversity of work being done. While this makes for a rich and exciting research scene it can also make the task of developing vocabulary research skills a daunting one as specialist subfields develop ever more sophisticated concepts and methods. This book aims to give readers an understanding of the area that is both detailed and rounded by introducing them to understanding and doing vocabulary research from four key perspectives: corpus linguistics psycholinguistics language testing and teaching and learning. Within each area a state-of-the-art review describes fundamental concepts and commonly used methods evaluates ongoing methodological debates and points to areas for future development. It aims both to give readers a solid grounding in the specialized methods and debates associated with each area and to build connections across these specializations considering points of contact and ways in which they can work together.

Whenever we think about the world – including its concrete and abstract entities – we typically see a series of so-called mental images in front of our eyes that aid us in everyday problem solving and navigating ourselves in the world. Visual metaphors similarly to their linguistic counterparts largely build on such images.

Nevertheless the interplay of metaphorical/metonymical text and imagery is not necessarily (and not usually) straightforward and raises complex theoretical and methodological questions. The eleven chapters in this collection address a wide range of such challenges such as what are visual metaphors in the first place; how can they be identified; what is their relationship to linguistic metaphors; what are their most common manifestations; what knowledge structures are required for their interpretation; and how do they interact with metonymies. The studies cut across linguistics politics philosophy poetry art and history – highlighting the ubiquitous role that visual metaphor plays in everyday life and conceptualizations.

Originally published as special issue of Cognitive Linguistic Studies 7:1 (2020).

Syntactic priming is a naturally-occurring psycholinguistic phenomenon that has been used as an experimental manipulation to great effect: over the last 20 years syntactic priming research with children of different backgrounds has added to our understanding of the mechanisms and stages of syntactic development and priming. This collection of original articles explores the state of the art in that literature. Ten chapters review the findings of syntactic priming research with monolingual and multilingual typically-developing and atypically-developing child populations from a variety of language backgrounds. The expert authors explore what syntactic priming has revealed about children’s development of syntax and propose ways in which methodological innovations and broadening the scope of future research can build on this. The collection will be a useful resource for researchers from diverse areas of the field of child language particularly those with a focus on grammatical development.

This volume reveals new insights on the faculty of language. By proposing a new approach in the analysis and description of Italian Sign Language (LIS) that can be extended also to other sign languages this book also enlightens some aspects of spoken languages which were often overlooked in the past and only recently have been brought to the fore and described. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>First the study of face-to-face communication leads to a revision of the traditional dichotomy between linguistic and enacted to develop a new approach to embodied language (Kendon 2004). <br/>Second all structures of language take on a sociolinguistic and pragmatic meaning as proposed by cognitive semantics which considers it impossible to trace a separation between purely linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge.<br/>Finally if speech from the point of view of its materiality is variable fragile and non-segmentable (i.e. not systematically discrete) also signs are not always segmentable into discrete invariable and meaningless units. This then calls into question some of the properties traditionally associated with human languages in general notably that of ‘duality of patterning’. <br/>These are only some of the main issues you will find in this volume that has no parallel both in sign and in spoken languages linguistic research.

English Sentence Constructions departs from a usage-based theoretical perspective in which all language units -- which we refer to as constructions -- have both a meaning and form and context is all-important in determining the function and form of these constructions.

As a starting-level module English Sentence Constructions guides students of English or Language at tertiary level through different levels of analysis at the sentence clause phrase and word level.

The book starts with an explanation of different sentence types and structures (Chapters 1 and 2) zooms in on the verb phrase as the central component of any sentence (in Chapters 3 and 4) before zooming in even closer discussing word classes (Chapter 5) and phrases (Chapter 6). The next two chapters explicate the intricacies of sentence constituents that function as clauses (Chapter 7) and aid students in integrating all chapters by discussing sentence analysis at all levels (Chapter 8). The last chapter (Chapter 9) shows how knowledge about sentence constructions can be applied to effective writing in English.

English Sentence Constructions can be used in teacher-led modules but the many exercises in each chapter the clearly worked out answer keys and a comprehensive glossary of terminology also make it suitable for self-study. For each chapter there is an online test in which students can check their understanding.